The Assassination of Nizam al-Mulk is recounted as a targeted killing carried out by an Assassin acting in disguise. In the novel, the episode illustrates the lethal reach attributed to Hasan Sabbah’s followers, while its placement among later claims about secret societies shows how a historical event can be recruited into an increasingly elaborate conspiracy narrative.

The Killing

Nizam al-Mulk, a prime minister serving the sultan during the Crusades, was being carried on a litter toward the quarters of his women when his attacker approached disguised as a dervish. The Assassin stabbed and killed him. The account is brief, emphasizing the assailant’s disguise and the vulnerability of a powerful official even while he was being transported.

The Assassins and Their Methods

The episode appears within a description of Hasan Sabbah’s dominion over the Assassins. The text presents the killing as one demonstration of the claim that his adversaries could not escape his reach. It also places Nizam al-Mulk’s death beside the killing of the atabeg of Hims, who was slain by the Old Man’s followers despite being guarded by armed men. Together, the examples portray attacks on high-ranking targets as part of the group’s reputation, rather than as isolated acts of ordinary warfare.

Retelling and Conspiracy

The novel later uses the episode in a different register: it traces how accounts of secret political plots are assembled, altered, and circulated. Diotallevi argues that the late nineteenth-century antisemitic campaign, associated with the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russia, was an initiative of the Paulicians. The claim is part of the characters’ invented historical framework, not an independently established explanation of Nizam al-Mulk’s death.

That framework treats the Protocols as a program of contradictory political tactics, including the promotion of revolution and disorder, and follows the adaptation of earlier texts into accusations against new targets. The narrative recounts how the Jesuits attributed the Ordonation to Jews, how the Times traced the Protocols to Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, and how Rachkovsky allegedly altered a text associated with Elie de Cyon by substituting Jews for Witte. Against this accumulation of supposed connections, the earlier assassination functions as an example of the real violence around which later stories of secret power can gather: the novel distinguishes the reported killing from the characters’ speculative network of causes and conspirators.